Tune in here at 1PM to hear Awl pals Maria Bustillos and Evan Hughes (among others) discuss David Foster Wallace.

“If I meet someone, my smartphone should know if we are meeting for the first time by close observation. If I introduce myself and shake hands, our phones should then automatically exchange information. No need for antiquated business cards. If my TV knows there is someone else in the room with me, it could suggest content to watch, either by recognizing me visually, or by talking directly to my iPhone to learn the shows we both like on Facebook or Twitter. The movie I’m watching will automatically pause when I need to go to the bathroom. The TV will just turn on and off when I sit down or stand up.”
 — Am I the only one who thinks this sounds terrifying? Do I really want my devices to know exactly how goddamn boring my life is?

Photo by Refat, via Shutterstock

Over the weekend, Sony freaked out when they heard David Denby’s review of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” was coming out in the New Yorker today, sending out a dramatic “please respect our embaaaaaargo” email to all and sundry. (The “embargo” date is December 13. Forced to define the rationale for embargoes, their reasoning is tepid, at best: “[E]mbargo dates level the playing field and enable reviews to run within the films’ primary release window, when audiences are most interested.” But, you know, trailers should come out four months before the film. Mmm hmm.) Then producer Scott Rudin wrote an email to Denby, which was so clearly for public consumption, as it was immediately “leaked,” because you have never, ever seen such a calm and polite communication from Rudin. What Scott Rudin is this and where is the real one? Denby’s points in debate with Rudin are decent, if not particularly relevant: he’s definitely right that critics (and even movie-goers) are pretty hosed that Oscar movie season is like a few weeks long and also over the holidays. (And then, the February — April movie season assaults our intelligence.) People break embargoes all the time; but because this is an Oscar movie, the studio is treating it like the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

In the end it’s not an issue for anyone else but the small number of people who actually both read magazines and go see movies, and Denby’s review (LOL, subscription-only) is boring, not revealing, hasty and just not very good. (He’s my least-favorite movie critic anyway, but c’mon.) It’s 50% plot explanation and 25% praise for its star; it’s without any kind of utility for movie-goers, and it actually seems weird and wrong — elaborating on how the titular full-time batteree Lisbeth Salander is a sex goddess, basically, which is like… gross? Makes you wish Andrea Dworkin was alive to handle that one! So it’s tough to be on Denby’s side. But mostly this whole episode reads like the studio and producers capitalizing on a moment for publicity.

“That’s the NBA we will get in December: One where every bit of action is, for the viewer, shot through with ambivalence. We will love it like never before, while wondering if, just maybe, no one’s having quite as much fun as they once did. We could be projecting, but ultimately, most of what we see in athletes is an attempt to come to terms with what we need them to be. We love this game and yet now we — or the players, or folks paying them — kind of hate everyone. Including ourselves.”
 — There are twelve people in the world, the rest are paste. Many of those twelve are Awl pals, some of whom have started a new sports site called The Classical, which launched over the weekend and already has some wonderful writing going on.

Of the 43 million U.S. citizens who are between 10 and 19, only about 3 million have received naked pictures from someone by cellphone, survey says. And only a million of them have sent naked pictures of themselves or took naked photos of others to send! All this talk about sexting and that’s all that’s going on? That’s about the usual carve-out for “people who will never hold elected office or teach or be lawyers,” generationally speaking, so no need to work about the sexting epidemic. This is why you’re supposed to have 3 or 5 children, so a couple of them can drop out along the path to success, due to sexting or disease.

by Justin Wolfe

“The so-called ‘tasteful’ Playboy pics will be… a classic tribute inspired by original Tom Kelly nude pictorials of Marilyn Monroe…. According to sources, Playboy began taking Lindsay Lohan photos last week, while she was juggling other duties like ordering cupcakes to the morgue.”
 — The Hollywood Gossip, 11/8/11, 10/25/11.

He told her that she was moving too much, that she had to stay stiller, the camera was finicky, the exposures depended on no motion, like just stop breathing, he said looking at the playback, just stop breathing, okay. Lindsay thought it was a joke and laughed but he said it was serious, this was going to be on the app, super HD so the viewer could fingerzoom into her 1,000% without the quality falling off at all. She said okay and tilted her head back to the left the way he told her, like in the second bed picture, number 18, and he leaned in to move the curl in front of her eye to match the reference, holding his phone up against the light to check. She didn’t like it when he touched her, the way his fingers hovered, but she didn’t know how to tell him to stop without making him angrier, he was in such a mood and it was just the two of them alone in the house, not even a make-up girl. The magazine had pitched it as an “intimate encounter” between photographer and model, like Marilyn and Bert, and he had seemed so okay when she’d met him with her people at Bastide and anyway how was she going to say no once they made her the offer. Now he was different, though, a different person, and he walked away and she couldn’t see him because of the lights but a few seconds later he told her that he was ready to shoot. He said to stop, to hold it, and he took a frame, the shutter clicked, and then he took another and then he stopped for a minute and she inhaled as the shutter clicked again, she hadn’t known there was going to be another right then, why. He raised his voice from behind the camera and said listen I told you to hold it, just for one second, I’ve heard you were difficult but this is a simple piece of direction, okay, now you have the pose fine so all you have to do is just hold it and stop breathing, and so she did, she stopped

like at the morgue the other morning when she’d seen the girl with the same scar as her. The first few days they’d just had her sweeping and washing windows and filing things in the office and it had been fine, she had signed autographs and a Mean Girls DVD for some secretary’s kid but then she had been dumb and accidentally tweeted from the bathroom. She had just wanted to thank her followers for their support in this tough time and tell them how much she loved them and it had been retweeted five thousand times and there was a story that night on TMZ about her getting special treatment and then she came back the next day, they’d sent her into the autopsy rooms with everybody else. So many rooms, so many bodies. They didn’t have to touch the bodies, her lawyer had made sure before she’d signed the papers, but they had to clean the tables after they had been used for the bodies. There were fluids that remained, dead cells, strands of hair; the woman doing the introduction used the word “ephemera.” There were all those things and sometimes, on other tables in the rooms near the empty ones they scrubbed with their paper towels and bleach, there were bodies, ones that had been examined and ones that were waiting to be seen before going away, boys and girls and men and women, all shapes and sizes, all of them so still

and he took a few more frames and said he got it and she inhaled and they were moving to the next setup. He told her to arch her back and stick her ass up in the air, to spread her knees some more, and she started to do it by reflex but then sunk back into the sheet and stopped, asked him what shot this was exactly. It was rhetorical, there was no shot with an arched back, that wasn’t Marilyn with Tom Kelley in 1949, that was Hustler, that was Penthouse, that was trashy girls with tramp stamps on YouTube, that was not what she had done the prep for, read the books and watched the movies and learned the positions and the expressions, how to find her light. She had done all that and now he was saying that the contract didn’t say anything about every shot having to be an exact copy, he wasn’t fucking Gus Van Sant; he was saying that Hef had a lot of nice ideas about what was classy and they were going to do those shots too but that this was 2011 and he was going to take a close-up of her ass and could she please stick it up in the air and for the love of God stop breathing so hard, which was not something even Tom Kelley would have had the nerve to ask Marilyn to do when he came to her at her lowest point and asked her to show all the private parts of herself to the world and him for fifty bucks. It was ridiculous but in the end what was she going to do, she needed the money more than she needed to feel good about herself and so she stuck her ass up in the air and buried her head in the sheet and stopped breathing and in the darkness she saw

the bodies on the tables, all of them so still, like at the wax museum downtown where she had gone to visit Marilyn the day she’d signed the papers, all these bodies frozen forever but especially the one, this girl with blonde hair she’d seen just before lunch the other day, the girl with her scar. Most of the time the bodies were covered in sheets or wrapped in bags but sometimes the sheets slipped and sometimes the nurses forgot to zip the bags and sometimes the PO’s wanted to mess with you and set up a scare for you before they sent you in the room. There was one of them who called her “Star” in the line-up and she knew he was fucking with her when he called her it but it still made some part of her feel good anyway and that was even worse, she knew, and if she could afford more therapy she would talk about it then. He had sent her into the room on the third floor before lunch and Lindsay had turned away from the stain she was scrubbing because the bleach was making her dizzy and as she turned she saw the scar on the inside of the girl’s right thigh, a little raised circle the size of a pencil eraser, almost invisible but she saw it

and when the posing was over and John offered her his pack of Parliaments and asked her, after all the yelling and the swearing and the telling her that she wasn’t allowed to breathe, asked what she was doing for Halloween, if she wanted to you know hang out. She took one out of the pack and lit it like Dietrich in high key, her eyes burning through him, and said she didn’t really go out anymore, that it wasn’t her thing, that she was a different person now. She exhaled and he smiled and said, oh sure, got you. A changed woman, he said, a miracle. He was such an asshole and when she was younger she might have told him, but instead she just smoked and looked out at the surf from the back of the house and then left, changed. She had been Marilyn for him and the camera and now she wasn’t, now she was just herself again, whatever that was. She had told him she was a different person and he had nodded like they all did and smiled that smile, looking at her but not seeing anything. It didn’t matter what he or anyone saw, though, she was different, she had changed, you had to keep changing because otherwise you were

the girl who drank half a bottle of tequila and danced on the table and did three lines in the bathroom of the Roxy and went back to her bungalow with a guy who put out a lit cigarette on the inside of her thigh because when he fucked her she said she couldn’t feel anything, otherwise you were in the front seat of a car and your nose was bleeding and the road was spinning and the lights were pointing up into the night but not pointing to any stars, otherwise you were a little girl in a ponytail and a t-shirt pretending to fight with her own identical twin for fourteen takes because they couldn’t get the camera right, or the light, otherwise you were Marilyn cast in wax and wrapped in a white dress and stuck in a dark room on Hollywood Boulevard with your hands between your knees as a vent blew cold air up your skirt forever,

otherwise you were laid out on a table showing your scars to the world, frozen in a pose you couldn’t control until the day when everyone had forgotten your name. Lindsay couldn’t let it be that way, it wasn’t right, it couldn’t be. She picked the sheet up off the ground and lifted it above the girl, as high as she could reach. It caught the air like a sail, hanging in slow motion, and then settled over her, the folds outlining her form.

Justin Wolfe is a writer and student living in Bloomington, Indiana. His most recent blog is firmuhment; before that, he wrote songs about buildings and food.

“A Moscow court on Friday ruled that the country’s sole independent election watchdog had broken Russian law by publishing citizens’ complaints about campaign abuses during the run-up to this weekend’s parliamentary elections.”
 — “Most of the reports concern the ruling party, United Russia, which is struggling to preserve its control of parliament at Sunday’s vote.”

What are you going to see at the movies this weekend (if you’re not being held all weekend by the LAPD for exercising your First Amendment rights): the one with the dude with the giant schlong or the movie about the girl who gets paid to be unconscious while old dudes fondle her? USA! USA! Or have you seen Melancholia yet? Apart from the first five minutes, which are A+, and maybe the next 45, which are sinisterly hilarious, it’s pretty much like these nine things, which include but are not limited to “overdosing on cement mix and diet tonic water” and “listening to a radio play that was originally written in Swedish, then translated into German, and finally into English. In the dark. With a stranger who won’t stop weeping and touching your leg. In a room that smells like cigars.” Meanwhile, about an hour ago, people emerged from today’s critics’ screening of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (But With Extra Rape And In English This Time) and you probably didn’t. Someday! Like growing up swishy, December gets better as it merrily rows along. Stay strong! Tinker Tailor Soldier See You Next Weekend I Guess!

Remember the guy whose severed thumb was replaced by his big toe? Well, Britain’s James Byrne (or, as the BBC has it, “Toe-Thumb Man”) has had his bandages removed. You can go have a look if that sort of thing interests you.

1. Stinkers
2. A bad lot
3. Little brat
4. Wart
5. Nasty little worm
6. Dangerous creature
7. Bluebottle
8. Nasty, dirty things
9. Little brute
10. Gangster
11. Little beast
12. Brigand
13. Little viper
14. Rat with a tail coming out of its head
15. Clot
16. Blackhead
17. Foul carbuncle
18. poisonous postule
19. Disgusting criminal
20. Denizen of the underworld
21. Member of the Mafia
22. Thief
23. Crook
24. Pirate
25. Rustler
26. Miserable little gumboil
27. Suppurating little blister
28. Serpent
29.. Robber-bandit
30. Safe-cracker
31. Highwayman
32. Greedy little thieves
33. Not a very pretty sight
34. Bunch of nauseating little warts
35. Load of garbage
36. Blister
37. Piece of filth
38. Walking germ factory
39. Little fool
40. Ignorant little slug
41. Witless weed
42. Empty-headed hamster
43. Stupid gob of glue
44. Squirming worm
45. Small people
46. Hairpins
47. Buttons
48. Ass
49. Poisonous little pockmark
50. Bunch of morons
51. Unhatched shrimp
52. The bane of my life
53. Insects
54. Flies
55. Disgusting little cockroach
56. Filthy little maggot
57. Vile, repulsive, repellent, malicious little brute
58. Clotted carbuncle
59. Useless bunch of midgets
60. Blithering idiot
61. Festering gumboil
62. Flea-bitten fungus
63. Stagnant cesspool
64. Nasty little idiots
65. Bursting blister
66. Moth-eaten maggot
67. Mangled little wurzel